Basque History of the World (13 page)

Now there were not only the Jews and the Muslims to flush out, but the Protestants, who in turn were having their own heresy hunts in the north. And there were the Bohemians (Gypsies) and Cagots.

Cagots were descendants of the Visigoths. The original Cagots may have been lepers, or perhaps just had a psoriasis-like skin disease. Outcasts in France, they were driven to the southwest, into Basqueland, and Cagot ghettos emerged in St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, by the nearby deep green valley of the Aldudes, and in the port of Ciboure, which was on the wrong side of the river in St.-Jean-de-Luz. Water touched by Cagots was considered contaminated, and they were barred from all trades involving food, including agriculture. They became noted for their carpentry.

Until the early seventeenth century, despite their pariah status, Cagots were considered good Christians and were protected by the Church. But in 1609, Judge Pierre De Lancre, French Basqueland’s most rabid witch hunter, said at his infamous St.-Jean-de-Luz witch trial that Cagots and Bohemians, both residing across the river in Ciboure, were consorting with the devil.

“Wandering Bohemians are part-devils,” De Lancre said of Gypsies. “I say these nationless long-hairs are not Egyptian, nor from the Kingdom of Bohemia, and are born everywhere while passing through countries, in the fields and under a tree, and dance and juggle like at a witches’ sabbath.”

No one who could be identified as distinct and different was safe in this age. It is inevitable that in such an era, the Church would also grow concerned about Basque heresy. In past times of intolerance, Basques had been lumped with other undesirable groups. In fourteenth-century Huesca, an area east of Navarra, an ordinance forbade the speaking of “Alavan, Basque, or Hebrew” in the market place. The Basques had accepted the persecution of Jews, Muslims, Lutherans, Gypsies, and Cagots. They should have been able to see that they would be next.

B
Y THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
, witchcraft should have seemed a ridiculously old-fashioned accusation. In 787, Charlemagne had outlawed the execution of witches and made it a capital crime to burn a witch. A tenth-century Church law, Canon Episcopi, demanded that priests preach against belief in witchcraft as superstition. By the fourteenth century, stories of witchcraft were widely dismissed among educated circles as a primitive belief of peasants.

But by the late sixteenth century, the Canon Episcopi, which had been universal Church law, was being circumvented by the claim that society was faced with a new and more virulent form of witchcraft and therefore the old laws did not apply. Witches, poor rural women, were consorting with the devil just like the Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Gypsies, Lutherans, and Cagots.

Neither De Lancre’s trials in St.-Jean-de-Luz nor the Tribunal of Logroño betray even a hint of cynicism. All evidence indicates that even some of the most fantastic tales told by witnesses and in confessions were believed at face value.

The Canon Episcopi had cautioned that women who claimed to be flying through the air on the backs of wild animals were in reality remaining on the ground and simply having hallucinations induced by the devil. Yet somehow, seven centuries later, men of the Church, of law, of learning, appeared to believe that women in the mountains of northern Navarra were rubbing an ointment on their bodies in order to fly through the sky to witches’ sabbaths.

Doubts lingered. Interrogators earnestly tried to make a distinction between true events and the sort of delusions referred to in the Canon. Among the questions prepared by the tribunal was whether rubbing ointment and then flying was the only way to get to the sabbath.

In spite of the improbability of many of the accusations, it is striking how widely accepted they were. Even in modern times, this history is often treated as incidents of witchcraft, rather than incidents of mass hysteria. It seems likely that a frightened peasantry, attacked for being different, was coerced into absurd confessions. But rather than asking why this persecution took place, the question frequently asked is why the practice of witchcraft occurred. Pío Baroja, son of a distinguished journalist and himself a doctor and prominent twentieth-century novelist, rather than try to explain seventeenth-century witch hunting, attempted to explain why there were so many witches. He suggested that perhaps pre-Christian Basque beliefs had combined with a movement rebelling against the Church.

Baroja’s nephew, Julio Caro Baroja, a leading ethnologist, set off a witch craze in Basqueland in the 1970s with the publication of scholarly studies. Despite Caro Baroja’s reasoned books exploring the nature of the hysteria, it became fashionable once again to talk about Basque witchcraft not as a persecution by the authorities but as an exotic folk practice.

Pío Baroja had reversed the old bigotries, and rather than blame the Arabs and Jews, argued proudly that witchcraft was a uniquely Christian phenomenon. “In Semitic religions,” he wrote, “the woman is always seen banished from the altars, always passive and inferior to men.” In primitive European religions, on the other hand, according to Pío Baroja, “the great and victorious woman appears. Those first Christians—the Jewish race—did not have, could not have a cult of the Virgin Mary.”

But if belief in witchcraft was about empowering women, as Pío Baroja asserted, the witch hunts themselves were clearly an attack on women. Although a few men were also accused of witchcraft, the essential belief was that a woman with power necessarily used it for evil. De Lancre made this clear in the 1600s in his embrace of an old Semitic myth about women. In explaining why the Basques were afflicted with so many witches, he said, “This is apple country: the women eat nothing but apples, they drink nothing but apple juice, and that is what leads them to so often offer a bite of the forbidden apple.” And it is true, though not necessarily suspicious, that the people in Labourd, Guipúzcoa, and Navarra eat a great deal of apples and drink a lot of cider in the winter.

The antiwoman aspect of witch hunting becomes clearer when examining the nature of some of the allegations. The emphasis was on sexual perversion. Pío Baroja even offered lust as one of the possible motivations for practicing witchcraft. Women flew to secret rendezvous, where orgies were conducted with the devil. These clandestine orgies were known in Euskera as
akelarre
. The word comes from
akerr
, meaning a “male goat,” and
larre
, meaning “meadow.” The witches allegedly flew to a secret meadow and had group sex with a billy goat.

The accusation is reminiscent of Aimeric de Picaud’s concern for mares and mules. What stronger denunciation of an agrarian society than the charge of bestiality? Even in modern times, when Basque peasants engage in the duel by insults known as
xikito
, the accusation of bestiality remains a classic attack. And though to most people, sex with a goat would seem sufficiently perverted, it was not even conceded that they had conventional goat sex. It was group sex, and the goat sometimes used an artificial phallus, with the intercourse sometimes vaginal and sometimes anal. According to some accounts, the goat would lift his tail so the women could kiss his posterior while he broke wind.

The goat was a typical convergence of Basque and Christian imagery. It is horned and therefore associated with the devil. Martin Luther was sometimes depicted as a goat. But a black billy goat was also an important spirit in the pantheon of pre-Christian Basques. In the modern-day carnival of Ituren, which, like witchcraft, is a complex blend of pagan and Christian, a goat appears. Carnival, the last fling before lent, celebrates permitting the impermissible. While the joaldunak, grim-faced men in sheepskin with high cone-shaped hats who ring copper bells strapped to their backs, come and go from the mountains, clanging their huge bells, people appear dressed as monsters spraying hoses or as farmers throwing mud. The most frightening character of all, the one that always scatters the children, is a man dressed head to toe as a huge billy goat.

T
HOSE ACCUSED OF WITCHCRAFT
, being held in secret cells, their whereabouts unknown to the world, torture chambers awaiting, were urged to confess. Confession was rewarded with leniency. Many who confessed to the Inquisition were simply condemned to a few years’ banishment from their native village. A convicted heretic was an outcast for life, forbidden to ride a horse, barred from owning weapons, silk, pearls, or precious metals. If a heretic was burned, the stigma was passed to her family.

The accused was not initially informed of the charges. She was simply told to confess what was in her heart. If the accused waited until being charged, it was too late to avoid torture. The Inquisition, contrary to popular belief, saw torture as a last resort and was suspicious of confessions coerced by violence, though all confessions were made at least under the threat of violence.

Accusations of witchcraft were usually initiated by Basque peasants settling a grudge or explaining a misfortune. In Pío Baroja’s novella
La Dama de Urtubi
, a young man runs off to America to earn wealth and stature so he can court an aristocratic woman. But when he returns, he finds that she is interested in another man and concludes that the two have been bonded by a witch’s spell.

This is typical. A crop fails, someone falls ill, the apple tree didn’t bear fruit. Someone had clearly cast a spell. And there was often agreement on who the witch was—a woman who seemed to hold a grudge for some perceived wrong.

At the edge of St Pée, a forest begins which crosses the border at Dancharia, near Urdax, and drops down into a deep valley where villages are built in the dark quiet mountain crevices and farmers work the rugged airy slopes. In 1608, a young woman named María de Ximildegui returned to her native village of Zugarramurdi in this self-contained little world. The village, whose name means “hill of elms,” would never be the same.

An illustration of the Basque billy goat by Jean Paul Tillac (1880-1969) for a book by Arthur Campión. Born in the French southwest, Tillac, whose drawings chronicled Basque life, had one Basque grandparent. (Collection of the Musée Basque, Bayonne)

Young María de Ximildegui had spent several years across the border in Ciboure. Her family had remained there, but she returned to her hometown, where she informed the local authorities that she had been a witch in Labourd, and during that time she had attended a sabbath in Zugarramurdi. She wanted to name names.

She said that while living in Ciboure, she had been an active witch for eighteen months before trying to break away, a struggle with the devil that resulted in weeks of illness. A priest in Hendaye had saved her through confession.

Ximildegui named twenty-two-year-old María de Jureteguía as one of the participants at the Zugarramurdi ceremony. Jureteguía, along with her husband, accused Ximildegui of lying. But in a public confrontation, Ximildegui was so convincing, offering meticulous details, that the townspeople began little by little to believe her and urged María de Jureteguía to confess. Too late, Jureteguía realized that she was now in the position of being a suspected witch. Overtaken with fear and the exasperation of what had turned into a losing shouting match, she fainted.

Later, the panic-stricken Jureteguía realized that since she was believed to be a witch, she could only save herself by the mercy that comes after confession. So she confessed to having been led astray by her fifty-two-year-old aunt, María Chipía Barrenechea. So began a string of denunciations that unraveled the village.

After her confession, Jureteguía said that she was being pursued by witches, whom she would try to fend off with the sign of the cross. She would see them in the yard disguised as cats, dogs, and pigs. The townspeople reacted to this news without a hint of skepticism and began searching houses for toads. They all knew that toads were necessary companions to witches. The toad search lead to Barrenechea’s octogenarian sister Graciana, who would in time confess to being the queen witch of Zugarramurdi.

The first four witches in Zugarramurdi were accused of using an assortment of spells and powders to kill a total of eighteen children and eleven adults, and cause various harm to people, livestock, and crops. Eventually, ten witches confessed to a several-decade crime spree that included killing children and sucking their blood.

Incredibly, in a tribute to local Basque law, the village was able to resolve the entire affair bloodlessly, and the confessed witches were pardoned. The matter would have ended had not someone, the source remains anonymous, gone to the Inquisition.

In 1609, four accused witches and an Euskera translator were taken from the village by the Inquisition. More and more villagers were arrested, and the confessions were spectacular. Jureteguía admitted to a childhood of witchcraft. She had guarded a flock of toads and was punished if she did not treat them with the utmost respect. Her aunt would sometimes reduce her to a minuscule size, enabling her to pass through tiny chinks in walls. Many admitted to passing through small holes. They described elaborate initiations in which they were presented with a well-dressed toad. They had sexual intercourse in a variety of ways with the devil and with each other, both heterosexually and homosexually, including with members of their own family, all supervised by the elderly Graciana Barrenechea. They also confessed to infanticide and vampirism, cannibalism, defiling of tombs, eating of corpses. One admitted poisoning her own grandchild.